Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Nationality feels like an impermissible topic to bring up
when writing about the appeal of music. Like
something that’s vaguely discredited, or at least outmoded: left behind for good (in both senses) in our
post-geographical, distance-shrinking world.
Celebrating hybridity, intermixture and impurity is always going to seem
more progressive than fetishising the essential, the unchanging, the
parochial. Yet national character
continues to have a potent attraction.
Englishness of a particular musty sort seeps from every pore of
eMMplekz’s dankly addictive Rook to TN34.
And Englishness of a brightly enchanted kind forms a fragrant haze around I, Gemini , the debut album from Let’s
Eat Grandma.

This teenage duo could hardly be more English, from their
names – Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton—to their singing voices, which have
the crumbly texture of Wensleydale, reminding me at various points of Sophie
from Detectorists, Cassie in Skins, and Lola from the kids’s
animation series Charlie and Lola. The
only time they break the spell of quintessential Englishness is their name –
they should really be called Let’s Eat Granny.

Musically, too, they summon to mind a bunch of frightfully
English things: Danielle Dax, Matching
Mole, Pram, Kate Bush. Not that they
ever really sound much like any of these. But the ballpark – or should I say, cricket pitch – is the same:
quirky, homespun, a little precious, child-like in a way that teeters close to
twee but never crosses the line.

Let’s Eat Grandma play up their Englishness and their tender
years with the way they present in photo sessions and in the video for the
single “Deep Six Textbook”. With their lace frocks, long golden tresses, and milky
complexions, they come across a bit like modern-day equivalents of the
miscreants behind the Cottingley Fairies photographs – girl-cousins who let
their imaginations get away with them and fooled half the world. On “Deep Six
Textbook,” Jenny and Rosa sing as classroom daydreamers who’d rather be
communing with the starfish and the ocean than stuck indoors being trained for
productive adulthood: “we live our lives in the textbook... I feel like
standing on the desk and screaming ‘I DON’T CARE!’”. Listening to their motley sound-palette, you
often picture a school music room full of battered instruments: recorder,
ukulele, electric organ, xylophone, triangle, rough-toned violin, the stray
components of a drum kit, a long outmoded synth. Song titles like “Chimpanzees in Canopies”
and “Welcome To The Treehouse” evoke Nature Studies projects, school trips to
the zoo, and back garden fun ’n’ games.

But the innocence doesn’t feel forced. At sixteen and
seventeen, Hollingworth and Walton are barely out of childhood. More like sisters than the
friends-since-age-four they are, their voices appear to have grown alike
through prolonged proximity, like plants entwining together in a neglected
garden. Gemini is the Latin for twins and the album title I, Gemini seems to speak of a near-telepathic bond: a single mind
shared across two bodies.

One of the emerging clichés of today’s brainy music-making
(and music-reviewing) is “world-building”. Everybody’s at it: constructing
sprawling concept albums that are the audio setting for Game of Thrones- scale
sagas or epic near-future dystopias. I,
Gemini sounds like a world, yes, but not one consciously assembled, just the
byproduct of a private space of pure imagination that flourished between
constant companions. Think Heavenly
Creatures, without the upsetting ending.

Sometimes the organic quality of I, Gemini feels a little off the cuff. “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms” coalesces haphazardly
at first, like a primary school music class converging around a tune, while
“Sax in the City” sounds like a one-man band with its ukulele, toy cymbal, and
honking horn. But the thrown-togetherness is deceptive: there’s a consummate attentiveness to texture,
structure, and, most vividly, space in evidence. “Deep Six Textbook” sounds like a song heard
with a seashell cupped to your ear. Its muzzy washes of Caravan-keyboard and
stoic tick-tock beat set deep in the distance have me casting back to late
Eighties recordings by A.R. Kane and Cocteau Twins for an equivalent sense of intimate
emptiness.

Norwich, the girls’ hometown, is a bustling city in a county
that’s largely rural, full of flat expanses, and often considered a bit of a
backwater. Like an audio illustration
for Raymond Williams’s English culture study The Country and The City, the album shuttles back and forth on a branch
line that stretches from Virginia Astley to Lady Sovereign. Just when you think they’re all about winsome
pastoralism, Let’s Eat Grandma will start rapping – sounding, on “Eat
Shiitake Mushrooms”, like Cranes’s baby-voiced Alison Shaw reborn as a grime MC
from E3. Whether sung or spat, Hollingworth
& Walton’s slack enunciation belies their out-of-time, Picnic At Hanging Rock image: this is actually a rather modern style of
singing*, something you hear across the spectrum from Calvin Harris, Ellie Goulding and Selena Gomez to AlunaGeorge and James Blake.
But Let’s Eat Grandma push it further, smudging fricatives and bilabials, making syllables
fold and kink sideways, half-swallowing
their vowels or swilling them around the palate. It’s like they’re delectating
in their own voice-stuff, and who could blame them?

This meld of savory-sweet singing, moreish melody,
glistening texture, strange space and surprises galore makes I, Gemini the best pop-not-pop album
since Micachu & the Shapes’s Jewellery.
(Without ever resembling it at all). And
as with that album, Gemini is backloaded: each new song better than
the one that precedes. Things really take off as we pass the half-way mark.
“Rapunzel” is their “Wuthering Heights”:
romanticism so gauchely gushing only 17 year olds can get away with it. The
song starts with an upper-octave piano cycle that spins an atmosphere of
twinkly magic, like the moment in Le
Grand Meaulnes when the protagonist stumbles on the lost chateau in the
forest. Then it gathers to a pounding pitch of tempestuous grandeur, with a
storyline about a 7-year-old runaway from domestic discord suddenly stricken
with the realization “I’m not having fun in this fairy tale”.

“Sleep Song” likewise starts gently with
wheezy harmonium and plangent crinkles of guitar, then the lullaby bends to the
sinister with a babble of increasingly clashing voices, before spiraling into a
sort of soaring plummet of night-terror.
A song in two parts, “Welcome To The Treehouse” is their “Cloudbusting”:
the angelic screech of the vocals is the sound of hearts exploding, but who can
tell whether they’re bursting with joy or dread.

The star sign Gemini
(mine, as it happens) has among its strengths imagination, quickness,
and adaptability; among its weaknesses,
impulsiveness, flightiness, and
indecision. That all just sounds like the checklist for
adolescence. I Gemini ‘s allure for me as an aging expatriate is not just the
reassuring idea that Englishness abides, but that adolescence is much the same
as it ever was. The trappings have
changed – Instagram and Snapchat, rather than scrapbooks and pen pals – but the
fundamental things apply: boredom,
longing, restlessness, wonder, lust, spite, curiosity, confusion. “Oh yeah life goes on / Long after the thrill
of livin’ has gone”, warned that least-English of all singers Johnny Cougar,
before advising: “Hold onto sixteen as long as you can/Changes come around real
soon make us women and men”. If you
can’t find still and grasp tight within yourself those sensations of unformed
possibility, then second-best is to grab them vicariously, through music that’s
as thrillingly alive and ardently awake as this.

of their
telepathic internal combustion was depleted after their switch from
two-track to 16-tracks recording.Butthose later
albums, now CD-reissued by Mute, are far frombarren of
enchantment.

Indeed, 'Landed' (1975) is a bona fide
masterpiece and

no mistake. From
the bluesy, galactic garage rock of "Full

Moon On The
Highway" (with its weird chorus, like the vocal

has been dilated
and distended by an expert glassblower)

through the musky
Middle Eastern tapestry "Half Past One", to

the cosmic skank
of "Hunters And Collectors", the quartet are

in feverishly
fecund form. On "Vernal Equinox" and the 19

minute epic
"Unfinished" Can return to the unmapped territory of "Quantum
Physics" and "Peking O", an omniverse where thenormal laws of
sound no longer apply.
"Unfinished" is a flux

of unravelling
forms that coalesce into fleeting focus before

deliquescing
again; a sort of animated mosaic, or abstract

expressionist
cartoon.

"Flow Motion" (1976) is more
mainstream, the work of a

Can who were less
self-sufficient, operating with one ear cocked to the new
sounds of the day (reggae, disco, evenboogie). "I
Want More" was their one pop hit - if not a caseof Can selling
their soul, at least of them mortgaging it. But it's such a
joyous disco novelty, it's hard to begrudgethem. The main
vein of the album is rhapsodic, oceanic funknot far from what
was doing John Martyn at the time ("Solid

Air",
"One World") ; "...And
More" and "Smoke" are tribal

funk mantras that
anticipate 23 Skidoo and Byrne & Eno.

Later that year,
Can also released "Unlimited Edition",

treasury of
tracks from Can's gilded era (1968-75) that never

made it onto the
albums. It's all superlative stuff, with

special honours
going to "Cutaway": 19 minutes of Can at

their most
combustively spontaneous, going through myriad

phases, before
eventually devolving into a primordial soup of

DNA strands,
helixes and lattices.

"Saw Delight" (1977) was where the
rot began to set in.

Too often, Can
cross the thin line between wandering and

meandering,
nomadism and onanism. New member Rosko Gee's

vocal's on
"Call Me" is awfully prog-rock. The 15 minute

"Animal
Waves" is formula Can (a pan-global, sensurround

groove, synths
that wax and wane, simmering percussion, an

exotic, sampled
Arabic vocal) that never ignites into magic.

"Don't Say
No" bubbles and froths jauntily enough, but its

lyric of mystical
affirmation must have jarred badly with the

negationist mood
of punk.

"Can" (1978) was
their last studio album (until
1989's "Rite Time") and their first withoutbassist Holger
Czukay (the group's heartbeat). It's not abad swansong.
"All Gates Open" mismatches hokey harmonicwith cosmic jaccuzzi
synth-whorls, over a crisp-and-spry James Brown
pulse. "Sodom" is yet another epic of iridiscent

amorphousness,
but must have sounded mighty flatulent next to

the anorexic,
angular demystification rock of the day (Gang

Of Four etc).
Bizarrely enough, "Aspectacle" - with it boogie guitar,
in-the-pocket funk groove, swoogly noises andMichael Karoli's
stoned, nonsense vocals - sounds uncannilylike Happy
Mondays. Even on their last legs, Can were asahead of their
time as ever.

As creators of a
unique sound-world of wanderlust and wonderment, Can are up there with Hendrix
and Miles Davis. Each phase of Can's meandering career has opened up vast
vistas of fertile terrain for subsequent bands to colonise and cultivate:
avant-funk (Talking Heads, PiL, Cabaret Voltaire), trance-rock (Loop, f/i, Cul
de Sac), lo-fi (Pavement, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282) and post-rock (Bark
Psychosis, Laika). As well inspiring
solitary eccentrics from Brian Eno to Mark E. Smith to '90s ambient guru
Mixmaster Morris, Can also uncannily anticipated many moves made by entire
genres of contemporary 'sampladelic' music, such as ethno-techno, jungle and
ambient hip hop. Basically, when it comes to psychedelic dance music, those
crafty Krauts wrote the goddamn book.

Can's core members--bassist Holger Czukay,
keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, drummer Jaki Liebezeit and guitarist Michael
Karoli--came from avant-garde and improv-jazz backgrounds; Czukay and Schmidt
had both studied with Stockhausen. But
instead of exploring aleatory noise or jerky time signatures, Can
discovered--through The Velvet Underground, and later via James Brown--the
Zen-power of repetition and restriction. Minimalism and mantra-ism were
hallmarks of the Krautrock aesthetic, but what set Can apart from their peers
was their fervent embrace of groove.
Like Miles' early '70s albums ("On The Corner", "Dark
Magus" etc), Can's best work fuses 'black' funk with 'white' neo-psych
freakitude. Recording in their own
studio in a Cologne castle, the band adopted a jam- and-chop methodology
similar to that used by Miles and his producer Teo Macero: improvise for hours,
then edit the best bits into coherent tracks. As the band's Macero figure,
Czukay worked miracles with a handful of mikes and two-track recording. Can's proto-ambient spatiality actually
diminished when they went to 16 track in the mid-70s!

Early Can is a sort of kosmik garage-punk that
combines the metronomic drive of the Velvets with the abstraction of
Barrett-era Pink Floyd: over the throbbing Liebezeit & Czukay
rhythm-engine, singer Malcolm Mooney (and later his successor Damo Suzuki) yowl
acid-visionary drivel or onomatopeiac nonsense.
Highlights of this 1968-69 period include "Father Cannot
Yell", "Yoo Doo Right" and the awesome 15 minute rumble of
"Mother Sky".

Named after a sorcerer, *Tago Mago*
contains Can's most disorientating, shamanic work. Torn between two impulses-
James Brownian motion and post-Floyd chromatic flux--the double album ranges
from the polyrhythmic roil of "Mushroom" and "Oh Yeah", to
"Augmn"'s dub-reverberant catacombs, to the fractal sound-daubings
and scat-gibberish of "Peking O".
A meisterwerk.

After the tense angst-funk of *Ege
Bamyasi*, with its sharply etched guitar and crisp beats, Can's music literally
seems to blossom with *Future Days* and *Soon Over Babaluma* (two glorious
summers in a row, after the rotten weather that shadowed *Bamyasi*, is the
band's own explanation). Can's
octopus-limbed ethnofunkadelia is as succulently sensuous and touchy-feely
prehensile as a rain forest or coral reef.
At once light-hearted and urgent-like-your-life's-breath, the music
embodies the band's Zen creed of mystic-materialism: pantheistic awe, take the
world in a love embrace, every day is Mother Earth's Day, etc. So *Future
Days*'s title track is a shimmering aural vision of Paradise Regained, while
the side-long "Bel Air" is as beatific as a sea otter basking off the
coast of British Columbia. On *Babaluma*, the balmy, aromatic "Come Sta La
Luna" sways to an undulant, off-kilter tango rhythm, but it's Side Two's
sequence of "Chain Reaction"/"Quantum Physics" that is
Can's absolute zenith. "Chain" is all flow-motion effervescence and
iridescence, sonic hydraulics as ear-baffling as Escher's aquaducts and weirs
are eye-confounding; "Quantum Physics" is a chaos theorem, funk
translated into abstruse, polydimensional equations. Czukay's percussive/melodic bass and
Liebezeit's Morse Code drum resemble the mandible-clicking telecommunication of
the insect world.

Can's late '70s albums replay the
*Future/Babaluma* phase's mystic and musical motifs, but with steadily
diminishing returns and a rising whimsy-quotient. *Landed* is their last great album. Its
highlight is the protozoan amorphousness of "Unfinished", 13 minutes
of aural paella (looks a mess, tastes great).
Other fine collage-tracks and 'musaics', like the 19 minute
"Cutaway", appear on *Unlimited Edition*--a grab-bag of unreleased
goodies recorded between 1968 and '75, ranging from exquisite addenda to
*Babaluma* like "Ibis", to items from the Ethnological Forgery Series
(affectionate pastiches of genres like trad jazz). Back in the studio, Can's muse was
ailing. The stylistic puree got lumpy
with *Flow Motion*, as reggae and blues entered the mixing bowl. *Saw Delight* is a prog-rock frightmare,
probably thanks (no thanks) to newbies Rosko Gee and Reebop Kwaku Baah
(ex-Traffic), who gradually displaced the disenchanted Czukay. *Out of Reach*
was so uninspired that it's never been reissued. The band rallied slightly for
the sprightly swan-song *Can*, parts of which bizarrely pre-empt Happy Mondays'
guttersnipe disco. Ten years later, the
band re-united for the surprisingly excellent, if scarcely earthshattering (the
world had caught up with them by then) *Rite Time*; the highpoint, "Like A
New Child", is possibly Can's most gorgeous groovescape since *Babaluma*.

During the decade-long diaspora between
break-up and brief reunion, the Can clan flowed everywhichway; *Cannibalism 3*,
a sampler of their solo work and collaborations, will help you navigate the
delta of stimulating, if seldom wholly satisfying, music. Czukay's six solo albums
and sundry link-ups (with David Sylvian, Jah Wobble et al) are probably the
most compelling; *Movies*, with its pioneering shortwave-sample of Iranian pop
on "Persian Love", is something of a classic. Schmidt's soundtrack work (reissued on the
triple-CD *Anthology*) is always interesting, if lacking Can's rhythmic
intensity. As for introductions to Can itself, *Anthology--25 Years* is the
most up-to-date selection. It's a
comprehensive crash- course for the cash-restricted, that inevitably skips
Can's longer--and wilder--excursions.

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Adamski

The Observer, 23 September 1990

by Simon Reynolds

Chaos is a word with special resonance for Adam Tinley, better known as Adamski. He even named his canine companion Dis after Discordia, the goddess of chaos.

"Music and madness" entered Adam's life when, as a precocious nine-year-old, he was freaked out by the spectacle of the Sex Pistols playing 'Pretty Vacant' on Top Of The Pops. By the time he was 11, he had his own "kiddy punk band", the Stupid Babies.

Throughout the ’80s, Adam nurtured an admiration for the former Sex Pistols' manager Malcolm McLaren, with his scams and subterfuges, and his slogan "cash from chaos". By 1986, Adam had formed Diskord Datkord, a Dadaist pop group, whose live performances frequently ended with the band performing entirely naked.

"Johnny Slut was ultra-camp and manic, a cross between Cilla Black and Robocop," recalls Adam. "My brother's role was sampling bits of what we were singing and hurling it back at us. The rest of the music was on tape. Our show was an extravaganza of visual and aural chaos. Most of our gigs culminated with the promoter pulling the plug, and us trashing the venue as a reprisal."

Chaos continues to be the guiding principle behind Adam's bewildering career trajectory. Last year, Adam was in demand on the rave scene as a live performer of acid house, which is usually a studio-based genre, and quickly garnered the tag of "keyboard wizard", a term which Adam himself finds nauseating.

But after the chart success of his instrumental single 'N-R-G' and the album Live and Direct, Adam confounded his image as a "Nineties Rick Wakeman", by releasing 'Killer'. A brilliant slice of futuristic blues, 'Killer' occupied the Number One spot for a month, thanks in no small measure to the harrowing, deep soul vocals of Adam's friend and collaborator Seal.

Now Adamski has confounded expectations again, by following the "heavy" statement of 'Killer', with the whimsical, deliberately throwaway 'The Space Jungle', a house track over which Adam sings Elvis Presley's 'All Shook Up' in a reedy tenor, and which is currently in the Top 10. 'The Space Jungle' is further evidence of Adam's desire to confuse. "I don't use formulas, and I do change every time I come up with a record," says Adam. "There's no method or masterplan."

But there is one element of continuity in Adam's career: his technophile attitude. He's constantly exhilarated by "all the great new machines for making music the Japanese come up with", while his videos are littered with sci-fi imagery.

The video for 'Killer' presented Adam as a Nineties alchemist. "When I was messing about with all the test tubes and buttons it was meant to look like I'd somehow made Seal's head." Like Betty Boo and S'Express, Adam takes a camp delight in off-beat ideas from previous eras of what the future would be like. The video for 'The Space Jungle' imagines an Elvis look-alike contest in outer space.

Adam also identifies with Saint-Exupery's hero the Little Prince and his castaway existence on a tiny asteroid. Adam's fragile, little-boy-lost demeanor (reminiscent of early Gary Numan), is probably the reason why he's the first teenybopper pin-up to emerge from the rave scene.

Not that Adam's exactly happy about this state of affairs.

"When I used to play raves, I never appeared onstage with lights, I was more like a DJ. When the album came out, it didn't even have my picture on it." But now certain, seminal acid-house producers like Frankie Bones have singled out Adamski as an opportunist, someone who used the rave scene as a stepping stone. Adam is adamant that the accusation is unfair.

"I started playing on the scene simply because I was going to raves a lot. I wanted to contribute something. It's true that I've always wanted to be a pop star, but I also just chanced to get into the scene, like a lot of others. A lot of pop stars have emerged from it."